John Ford taught us to regard every Western as an allegorical comment on America. And most of them are in some way. But Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is so abstract, primal, and fundamentally ambiguous that it lends itself to any number of readings. Which is maybe why cinebloggers can’t stop writing about it. If it doesn't work for you as a Western, try looking at it as a horror film.
Certainly, the film’s central character, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), is a monster. He rises from the dark earth that surrounds him when we first see him like Murnau’s Nosferatu (above). And his obsessive thirst for oil is like a vampire’s thirst for blood. This is even reflected in the title change from book to film - Upton Sinclair’s Oil! becomes Anderson’s Blood. The film conflates all liquids. Oil is the blood of the earth which becomes the metaphorical milkshake that Plainview describes in the film’s climactic scene — "I drink your milkshake. I drink it up!" — while making appropriate sucking sounds. Larry Cohen previously drew an analogy between vampires and capitalists in his Return to Salem's Lot.
It’s not that Plainview sees other human beings as his victims. He sees them as rival vampires competing for the same limited supply of precious fluid. There can be no mercy or fellowship among such monsters. The film ends in the vampire’s moldering castle — in this case, the real-life mansion of oilman Edward Doheny — where Plainview confronts his personal Van Helsing, holyman Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). Usually in confrontations of this kind (see, e.g., Hammer’s vampire films, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula) it is the Man of God who wields the phallic symbols of power, the crucifix and wooden stake. In Anderson’s film, vampire Plainview wields the phallic weapon, a wooden bowling pin.
So this is one of those horror films where the monster survives. Think of the end of John Badham’s 1979 Dracula where the vampire (Frank Langella) is carried away by the breeze leaving the Man of God (Laurence Olivier) behind, shaking his fist impotently at the empty air.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Plainview as Nosferatu: "I Drink it Up!"
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3 comments:
I think that's an interesting way of seeing the film, but I also think the movie is really too mal-formed, possibly deliberately, to read in any comprehensive way--yet I would argue the film followed more of a Secret Sharer doubles fable than your notion of the Vampire flick. Still, you've got a point, there is something horrory to the thing: the reverend Sunday character looked more like a moon faced refugee from Children of the Corn than he did a figure from the period. What's so confusing to me is that he film acts as if some major kind of tug of war were going on between Plainview and Sunday when Sunday is hardly in Plainview's league at corruption, lopsiding the film's structure. At the end Plainview projects his own sins onto the boy and then beats him to death as the ultimate act of self-loathing. But Anderson's scripting is slightly off, maybe even way off, and he doesn't make everything connect dramatically as it ought to. Another thing that goes with your suggestion, though, is that obviously you can read the Plainview character as at some point having lost his "soul". Yet you're never sure precisely why the film eventually focuses all its psycho drama on the reverend, who as I said before is no competion for Plainview whatever, whose really a distraction to the excellent subject of the booming oil industry's infancy, which just winds up getting used as a kind of vague interior symbol. Also, I think making the reverend a total phony was too easy. The end would have had much more power if we had sensed the boy really believed in all that churchy hick silliness but had been undone by the foibles that bring the best of us down; Plainview, self-justifying con extraordiaire that he is, might then have shown that he felt, wrongly, validated in his view of everything and everybody being as corrupt as he is, and so taking special pleasure in humiliating Sunday. That way we might have understood that what he resented was the boy's ability to have faith in something that isn't just material. I mean after all, excepting getting into some debt Eli's faults are fairly slim for all the creepy sliminess of his character's aura. At the end it seems like we're supposed to feel that Sunday and Plainview are in some way equivalent and that the boy is somehow a little bit worse and so basically gets what's coming to him. It's a ludicrous idea but explains the character's dehumanized reptillian mincing ministerialness and, in my opinion, is drama being used to make cheap self-satisfied faux-statements whose essential falsness may be why people are so confused by exactly what is meant. Plus, I'm fed up with Anderson's rhythms, always and finally falling back on explosions of violence which aren't really logically motivated by the material so as to jack up the audience's emotions and create the illusion of a climax. Plainview may be finished at the end, but I felt like the dramatization of an ambitious old-style tycoon was still waiting to be dramatized.
Thanks, VanVeen. (How's Ada?) If you want to see a great old-time tycoon, try Gerald MacRaney as George Hearst in Deadwood.
The comparison to Deadwood points to a major absence in TWBB, the lack of any real feeling of community. Unlike Deadwood or McCabe and Mrs. Miller where every member of the frontier community has a life of his or her own, the members of the community in TWBB are as if seen by Plainview - stick figures. The film is dedicated to Altman, but it has less in common with Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (the story of a community) than with his Secret Honor (the story of a raving solipsist).
The ardors and arbors of Ardis were of course great fun until my little girl started tarting around on me with every available squire in the county, but that's another memoir. So Deadwood's a good one huh? I've wanted to see that but never got around to it, now I shall. You're definitely right that TWBB, has no sense of community. All through the movie I kept wondering, do all these people find a creepy fake like Eli charming, like for real? But then I just figured it was one of those movie things like Dustin Hoffmann supposedly being convincing as a woman in Tootsie. I agree that Anderson isn't really similar to Altman either, he's far too much a control guy, and a good deal more campy. But I must say I'm not a big fan of Mccabe. To me it just seemed like a conventional sort of show-down western, only in slow-motion, so that you didn't much care at the end, like Thieves Like Us, and also that Chandler one, where the improvisation was so lame you could actually see Elliott Gould groping for a way to get to the point of the scenes before your eyes. I really think that technique of Altman's was over rated (except for in his freakiest poetic ones like Three Women and Images, and I liked the Grisham one quite abit too); not to mention Nashville is a numbing satire where the figures are the most condescending cartoons I've ever seen. What he did to Loretta Lynn...it was unspeakable. But back to TWBB--I don't think the community thing's the only problem. Mostly it's in the funky structure of the story, along with DDL's performance, which is mesmerizing but seems obscure unless you think out the thing pretty carefully. I was always just getting why characters had done what they had several scenes afterward. And why do you think all the interesting stuff with Plainview's child was done so eliptically? Surely it was more important and would have been far more dramatic than the silliness with Eli Sunday.
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